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Football and the Military in Contemporary Britain: an Exploration of Invisible Nationalism Football and the Military in Contemporary Britain: An Exploration of Invisible Nationalism Penn, R., & Berridge, D. (2018). Football and the Military in Contemporary Britain: An Exploration of Invisible Nationalism. Armed Forces and Society, 44(1), 116-138. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X16682784 Published in: Armed Forces and Society Document Version: Peer reviewed version Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights © 2017 The Author. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:05. Oct. 2021 Football and the Military in Contemporary Britain: An Exploration of Invisible Nationalism Roger Penn, Queens University Belfast Acknowledgements All the pictures used in the text were taken by the authors apart from Photographs F, G and H which were provided courtesy of Bolton Wanderers FC by Phil Mason, the Club’s Chaplain and Photograph I which was supplied courtesy of Carlisle United FC by their Head of Media, Andy Hall. Our thanks to both. 1 Football and the Military in Contemporary Britain: An Exploration of Invisible Nationalism Abstract: The paper explores the relationship between football and the military in contemporary Britain. This is situated within longstanding cultural and historical templates. It is based on observations conducted mainly in 2014 and 2015 and incorporates visual data (photographs) as part of the analysis. The primary focus is on English professional football and ranges from the 2014 and 2015 F.A. Cup finals to more local manifestations of the link between football and the military at Bolton Wanderers and Carlisle United. There has been a recent intensification of the traditional links between football, the military, the monarchy and the Established Church which embody a renewed form of nationalism. The paper dates the initial change to the Falklands War in 1982 and reveals how the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reinforced this pattern. Underlying the analysis is a complex conceptual/theoretical issue which centres on how the phenomena examined are generally invisible. This reveals the power of the dominant ideological assumptions that underpin these developments. Keywords: Football, Military, Britain, Nationalism, Visual Data. 2 Introduction This paper examines the relationship between association football [soccer] and the military in contemporary Britain. The study is situated within the broad trajectory of the oscillating relationship between popular attitudes and the military in Britain over the last four hundred years. The analysis of the current conjuncture explores this relationship empirically in relation to football at both the national and the local level. The interpretation is supported in part with visual data and involves the application of the notion of ‘invisible nationalism’. There has been considerable variation in popular attitudes in Britain towards the military over the last four hundred years or so. From the seventeenth century onwards there has been a persistent hostility amongst the British populace to the notion of a ‘standing army’ [i.e. a permanent army under the direct control of the monarch] (Christie, 1982). Reliance for national defence was placed primarily upon naval supremacy (Robson, 1957). Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, as the British Empire emerged globally, recruitment to the navy was often forced using the institution of ‘press ganging’ sailors at the main Channel ports in the south of England (Bromley & Ryan, 1970). Britain’s post‐Napoleonic Empire was rooted in overwhelming global naval superiority (Best, 1982). There remained popular hostility towards the army such that by 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Britain possessed a very small army (Beloff, 1984). Indeed, unlike the other major powers in Europe like Germany, France, Russia and Austria‐Hungary, Britain did not rely on mass conscription prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The two World Wars in the twentieth century witnessed widespread [almost universal] conscription (Parker, 1979). At the end of both wars, there was a strong reaction against military values involving the growth of both internationalism and pacifism, especially amongst those on the left of the political spectrum. By the 1960s, military values and, pari passu, the military itself were generally unpopular in Britain (Marwick, 1988 and Forster, 2012). However, over recent decades there has been a concerted effort by successive British Governments, as well as by the military itself, to promote the armed services and to legitimize the near‐permanent state of war. This has been evident across a wide range of contexts. In 2006, the Government initiated Veteran’s Day at the instigation of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, to recognize the contribution of British veterans. This was changed to Armed Forces Day in 2009 3 and has involved a burgeoning array of events that involve and celebrate the three armed services. There has also been a growth of links between the military and the educational system. Cadet Forces have been expanded in state schools and the Ministry of Defence [MoD] has funded ‘military ethos’ projects in schools to the tune of £45 million since 2011. The MoD has provided teaching resources to help promote the armed forces (Ministry of Defence, 2014) and, in addition, has created a programme designed to channel ex‐service personnel into the teaching profession through the ‘Troops to Teachers’ scheme. There have also been examples of secondary school Academies being funded by defence‐related companies, most notably BAe Systems’s sponsorship of Furness Academy in Cumbria. Remembrance Day has become increasingly prominent in recent years and this intensified in 2014 at the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Sport, and association football in particular, has been at the epicentre of these developments. This paper describes these changes both in terms of national sporting events but also at the more local level. By so doing, the paper reveals how sport and the military are increasingly intertwined in contemporary Britain. The Empirical Research The paper explores the relationship between football and the military in contemporary Britain. This has become significantly closer in recent years and can be seen as part of an increasing incorporation of the military within mainstream British culture and society. Much of this process is situated within longstanding historical cultural, political and social templates. Unlike the United States, the process is largely implicit and part of a deeply sedimented, taken‐for‐granted wider set of ideological assumptions about British life and British nationalism. The research was conducted in 2014 and 2015 and included ethnographic fieldwork primarily in the north west of England. It involved twenty interviews and a series of observations at a range of football sites, some of which were captured in the photographs used in the main body of the text. These photographs are an important element in the argument put forward in the paper and represent an example of the increasing use of visual data in contemporary sociological discourse (Rose, 2007 and Pink, 2012). As Jay noted in 1993, the visual has been marginal to social science until comparatively recently. Over the last twenty years, sociologists and ethnographers have increasingly incorporated visual materials 4 into their overall research strategies (Margolis & Pauwels, 2011). Such ocular data can be generated relatively easily nowadays using digital cameras, camcorders and mobile [cell] phones. Visual data have featured more commonly within the sociology of sport than in sociological analyses of the military (see Hockey & Allen‐Collinson, 2006 and Chaplin, 2011). This paper involves a combination of the two, albeit through the use of nine photographs. The underlying theoretical stance of the paper involves the application of the conceptual framework associated with the ‘Annales’ School of structuralist history (Braudel, 1949 and Duby, 1973). This emphasizes three separate arenas for analysis: long‐term ‘structures’, shorter‐term ‘conjunctures’ and immediate ‘events’. Recent Sociological Literature on Sport and the Military The preponderance of recent sociological literature on the relationship between sport and the military has originated from the United States. Over the past two decades social scientists have highlighted the growing relationship between the entertainment industries and the military in the USA, which has been particularly prominent in the sphere of sport (Butterworth, 2012). In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, sport and the media have cultivated highly
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